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The Narcissism of Small Differences

Beschreibung

Zadoorian’s previous novel, Beautiful Music (Akashic, May 2018) was a 2018 Michigan Notable Book and the Adult Fiction winner for the 2018 Great Lakes Great Reads program, presented by the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association.
The novel was also a best seller in Michigan.
Zadoorian is confirmed for 2019 Heartland Fall Forum's Moveable Feast program on 10/4/19.
Beautiful Music was an indie bookseller staff pick at Boswell’s, Fountain Bookstore, and McLean & Eakin.
Zadoorian did numerous, well-attended book events throughout the region and garnered a lot of support from indie stores and libraries throughout Michigan, as well as in Wisconsin, Illinois, Windsor, Ontario; he also appeared at the Miami Book Fair.
Zadoorian participated in Winter Institute 2018.
Beautiful Music received great review coverage in: O, The Oprah Magazine, Washington Post, Detroit Metro Times, Detroit Free Press, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, etc.
Like Beautiful Music, The Narcissism of Small Differences is set in Detroit, and in many ways it is an homage to the city.
Hardcover, paperback, and e-book released simultaneously.

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The Narcissism of Small Differences - Michael Zadoorian

Boxed in, pulled together, touching my tomb with one hand and my cradle with the other, I felt brief and splendid, a flash of lightning that was blotted out by darkness.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

Tell me exactly what happened. Did you do any heroic act?

No, I said. I was blown up while we were eating cheese.

—Ernest Hemingway

Table of Contents

___________________

Part 1: Detroit, 2009

Chapter One: The Two of Them

Chapter Two: The Law of Random Sync

Chapter Three: The Midlands

Chapter Four: Be Careful

Chapter Five: The Detroit Way

Chapter Six: The Daughter She'll Never Have

Chapter Seven: Ruin and Other Porns

Part 2

Chapter Eight: The Little Visitor

Chapter Nine: Gentlemen

Chapter Ten: Carpe Per Diem

Chapter Eleven: Is Selling Out Even a Thing Anymore?

Chapter Twelve: Getting into Cars with Strangers

Part 3

Chapter Thirteen: Full-Time Jobs and Other Petty Crimes

Chapter Fourteen: The Mythos of the Broken Hipster

Chapter Fifteen: Cool in Europe and the Tao of Funny

Chapter Sixteen: What Would Jesus Drive?

Chapter Seventeen: The Imitation-Wood-Grain Nightmare

Chapter Eighteen: Knowing Your Enemy

Chapter Nineteen: Heart of Tiki Darkness

Chapter Twenty: A Grand Rapids of the Mind

Chapter Twenty-One: Out Come the Freaks

Chapter Twenty-Two: Semi-Infidelities and Interim Campaigns

Part 4

Chapter Twenty-Three: Irony Loves Company

Chapter Twenty-Four: The Irish Car Bomb

Chapter Twenty-Five: Attempted Dinner

Chapter Twenty-Six: The Exterminating Angel

Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Verity of Decay

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Attempted Dinner, Part 2

Part 5

Chapter Twenty-Nine: A New Sincerity

Acknowledgments

About Michael Zadoorian

Copyright & Credits

About Akashic Books

1

Detroit

2009

1

The Two of Them

Are we weird?

Joe closed his eyes and quietly sighed. Not another one of these conversations. I don't know, Ana, he said, his voice belying a complete lack of enthusiasm in this subject. What do you mean by weird?

She was sitting on the floor of the living room of their town house, leaning back against the couch. She scooted her knees up until they were under her chin. "I don't know. Weird."

Joe was perched on a sixties lowboy chair directly across from her, paging through the latest edition of the Detroit Independent, the local alternative paper for which he wrote. He had wanted to look over the piece he had written on the works of Donald Goines, Detroit's bard of blaxploitation, but instead he was doomed to have this conversation. Look, you tell me what weird is and I'll tell you if we're it.

I don't know.

He folded the newspaper and tossed it in a vintage black wire magazine rack. Okay, what's up?

I don't know. I just feel like we're weird.

Really? he said. "I don't know what to tell you, but trust me, we are definitely not weird. There are lots of people who actually live different, crazy, interesting, weird lives—they go live on ashrams or tour with Sun Ra tribute bands. They go off the grid. They travel the world seeking knowledge. They go tripping on yage with a shaman in the Amazon. We, on the other hand, have jobs. We live in the suburbs. We go to Target, for fuck's sake. We are not weird. We are nowhere near weird. In fact, it makes me sad to think of how not-weird we are."

Ana's turn to sigh this time. "I disagree. First off, Ferndale isn't some affluent suburb. We're a mile from Detroit. We're an inner-ring city. And I don't know if what you have could be considered a job."

He was going to ignore that last comment. Fine, okay then, I guess we're weird. Maybe this would end if he just agreed with her.

People think we're weird because we've been shacked up for fifteen years. Ana wasn't letting him get off that easily.

That's not weird, Ana. That's monogamy. Very common and nonweird.

It's a little weird.

Another loud exhalation. Is that it? You want to get married?

Ana peered at him over her glasses, brow canted above the smallish cat-eye frames, as if he had just casually suggested a murder-suicide pact. Joe usually thought she looked wonderful in glasses until she did that.

No, she said. Why in god's name would we need to get married?

He shrugged. "I don't know. Because that's what most people consider normal?"

She laid her head back on the cushion of the couch and gazed at the ceiling. Hm.

People have an extremely low tolerance for weird. They think everything that's not exactly like them is weird. Trust me, we're disgustingly normal.

Please stop talking, Joe.

What? What do you want me to say? Truly, if we are what passes for weird, then the world is in big trouble.

After she left, Joe had an unsettled feeling in his stomach, a burning that only a couple of beers would help extinguish.

2

The Law of Random Sync

Ana did not know why she was saying these things. She didn't used to worry about being weird. Weird used to be a good thing, something she aspired to but never really achieved. So why was she complaining about feeling weird? She really just felt like complaining about something. It was true that she didn't feel normal. She felt in-between, in a boring, helpless, semicontented, semidisgruntled place. Neither here nor there, in a sort of no-woman's-land of the psyche.

Maybe she felt this way after ten years in a cramped two-bedroom town house in Ferndale (getting more cramped by the day, what with Joe's pack rat tendencies seemingly getting worse as he got older, making her worry that the two of them would someday be found dead after some sort of Collyer brothers hoarder avalanche). Maybe it was her still bringing in the bulk of the income for the two of them (which, admittedly, was irritating her more and more these days). Maybe it was the fact that Joe seemed to be walling himself off from her lately—out boozing with his friends or spending long periods of time in the study or falling asleep on the couch and not coming to bed until it was practically time to get up. Either that or getting up so early, there was little chance for face-to-face time, no time in bed, no time to talk about what was going on in their lives.

Ana missed when they used to cobble together a dinner out of what was in the fridge or pantry, open a bottle of cheap wine, light a candle, and sit at the table all night, just talking. It seemed like years since they had done that. And most every night had been like that at the beginning, at least when they weren't going out to some show or event or to meet up with friends.

There had been a lot of things going on back then. Maybe it was just their youth or that particular moment in Detroit or the fact that she had just gotten started in advertising and going out every night was just what everybody did at that time.

It was how she and Joe had met—a party at a photographer's loft in Eastern Market, someone with whom Ana had just shot one of her very first print ads.

The photographer, Michelle, had set up a makeshift set so she could shoot Polaroid portraits of all the guests. Ana had sat down on the so-tacky-it-was-fabulous crimson crushed-velvet couch from Lasky's in Hamtramck, to wait for her friend Lena (now married with a sweet brood, living in the far suburbs, at what felt like 108 Mile Road) to join her. Lena was taking too long, so Michelle the photographer told Joe, who was standing nearby, to sit down next to Ana. Joe looked around and behind him as if she couldn't possibly be talking to him.

I'm sorry? Excuse me?

Sit down next to her, said Michelle, who was obviously accustomed to arranging people and personalities for photographic purposes.

Joe continued to bumble and stammer. Oh, I, um. Okay. He plopped down on the other side of the couch.

What's your name? said Michelle.

Joe, he said, blushing furiously.

Okay, Joe, said Michelle. Move over closer to Ana.

Joe scooted over, looking worriedly at Ana, as if he was concerned about violating her personal space.

That's better. That's it. Now look interesting.

The resulting Polaroid revealed Ana covering her mouth in faux shock and Joe with eyes frozen wide and mouth slightly agape. A photo that when viewed now, with its slightly faded color and mottled edges, gave that moment and the life together that followed a retro feel, a strange, anachronistic sense of midcentury spontaneity.

When Joe saw it, he said in a deadpan, Well, I definitely look interesting.

Lena still hadn't appeared, so they walked over near the bar to look at Michelle's fine art photography (gritty but respectful portraits of the men and women who sold fruits and vegetables at the market) that was mounted and displayed there. After five minutes of talking to this sweet young man, with the floppy dark hair and furry secondhand cardigan, who was talking too fast, so excited about everything—about photography, music, art, and suddenly, obviously about her—Ana was already feeling something. She felt relieved. Yes, definitely relief. Was that strange? Was that actually love she was feeling right then, five minutes after meeting the guy? Probably not. It was too easy to look back at these things through a soft-focus romantic lens and think that, yet at that moment she had known she was capable of loving him.

Those first months were a lot of going out—events, performances, art openings, raves, poetry slams—whatever the hell was going on back then, they were there. Joe was quite the man about town. She liked that he was invited to everything and that he wanted to go everywhere and experience things and write about them. We've got to see this band here, that play there, the book-release party over here. They were together all the time.

But even with all the going out, there was also a lot of staying in, a lot of laughing. They genuinely seemed to amuse each other. Even when Joe wasn't in a good mood, he was still pretty funny. She came to appreciate his mild curmudgeonliness, his brand of gentle grouchiness. She found it amusing how he loved being in a dark, deserted, chilly movie theater on bright summer days, when everyone else was outside enjoying the beautiful Michigan weather. When she asked him about it, he said, Sunshine is overrated. It's like the climatic equivalent of a conventionally attractive blonde. You're obligated to think it's pretty. He stifled a smile, then held his index finger up to make one of his proclamations. "I refuse to be subject to the tyranny of so-called good weather!"

Oh, and there was a lot of sex. A lot of pretty darned amazing sex. When she would stay over at his place (which, while cluttered with books and CDs and VHS tapes and vinyl and cassettes and zines, was always surprisingly clean) on the weekends, sometimes he would blow off all the events he was invited to and they wouldn't leave for forty-eight hours. They would eat carryout, watch movies, listen to music, lie in bed and read (he always had something good around that she would come to appreciate—Dawn Powell, Terry Southern, Carl Van Vechten), and make love. They couldn't keep their paws off each other during that time.

Ana was just getting started as a junior art director, and while working on her very first television commercial, she heard a term from a producer that she couldn't help but to apply to her and Joe: the law of random sync. Which meant that when you put a piece of existing music up against a rough cut of a commercial, sometimes, just once in a while, everything accidentally matched perfectly. All the beats were there, the music changed at just the right points in the edit; even the energy was right, as if the music was scored specifically for the commercial. Yet it wasn't. It was all pure chance, but everything fit just right.

That was the way it felt between her and Joe, physically and every other way. They had randomly been thrown together and somehow everything fit.

And now, it had certainly been months since they'd had sex. That was one she didn't know how to explain. That was one she kept coming back to when she thought about the big birthday coming up. Was this it? After forty, no fucky? She knew it didn't have to be like that, but it sure felt like it was shaping up that way.

The only fun she'd been having lately was at work, which was strange since work hadn't been fun in a long time. Detroit advertising was hurting. The car companies were fleeing the agencies of their birthplace. Luckily, Ana was working at one of the few places in town that wasn't dependent on the automotive business. New accounts had actually come into the agency recently. Nothing fancy—vacuum cleaners, office-supply superstores, spark plugs—but she and her partner were doing good work and actually getting stuff produced. In a few days, she was going to LA for a week, which sounded pretty wonderful. Getting out of Detroit in January was its own kind of blessing for anyone struggling through an endless, lightless, near hopeless Michigan winter.

3

The Midlands

Joe bundled up and headed out into the bitter January cold to the Midlands, a bar whose name obliquely referred to what Ana had mentioned about Ferndale: the town directly bordered the city limits at 8 Mile Road, but it was a town that was not quite Detroit, with its 138 square miles of abandoned buildings and unrelenting poverty and deserted, pheasant-strewn urban plains; but nor was it the whiter, wealthier, more insular suburbs of the north. Ferndale was in-between, an interzone amalgam of white and black, gay and straight, blue collar and no collar, that had enjoyed a brief period of gentrification a few years earlier, but was now suffering along with the rest of the state after the collapse of the auto industry. The new condo complexes and manufactured lofts hadn't quite gotten a chance to get built. Thus the bad economy and suddenly sinking property values had made it possible for people who would normally be forced to move out—working musicians, teachers, public radio employees, and the few artist types who had amazingly figured out how to make a living doing their thing—to hang on awhile longer.

The Midlands had somehow managed to open its doors during that flourishing, fleeting period between creative-class boon and real estate boom. It was too nice to be a dive, too rough-hewn industrial to be uptown, with its burnished plywood booths and polished concrete bar, its walls full of local art, taps full of local beers, and jukebox full of local bands. The place was family friendly early in the evening, yet lousy with slouching scenesters after eleven o'clock. Joe preferred the time in-between.

Once settled at the bar, Joe shed his Carhartt but kept his beanie on, which he'd been doing more lately since his hairline started its slow but steady decampment northward. Still recovering from the icy walk, he treated himself to a microbrew, a Bell's Two Hearted Ale (after that he'd switch to a mass-produced and decidedly cheaper Stroh's), and began to read his book, Revolutionary Road. After a short while, his stomach started to calm as the beer worked its magic on those troublesome centers of his brain. Joe loved reading about fucked-up bourgeois types. And the novel felt like even more proof that even what was deemed normal wasn't necessarily good.

He couldn't stop thinking about their conversation. Weird indeed. It was disgusting how normal he and Ana were. Of course, their families didn't think so. He knew that there was much shaking of heads, aggravated exclamations of, Well, I just don't know, among the respective parents. Living together for fifteen years without matrimony, procreation, or a mortgage bewildered most Michigan parents. To them, he and Ana existed in some state of suspended maturation, and would do so for the rest of their selfish, soon-to-be-middle-aged, progeny-free lives.

He started to read the next page, but was distracted by a flyer on the bar.

THE MIDLANDS PRESENTS CHIN TIKI NIGHT!

OUR ANNUAL RITE OF SPRING

POLYNESIAN CELEBRATION

ZOMBIES—MAI TAIS—PU-PUS—

HULA—FILMS—VENDORS

EXOTICA MUSIC BY DJ DAVE DETROIT

MARK YOUR CALENDARS!

It was for the Midlands' yearly spring Chin Tiki party. Where the local bohos shed their winter parkas, donned aloha shirts, grass skirts, and coconut bras to ironically celebrate the arrival of spring. It was a big thing in Ferndale. A few years ago, Joe had written a feature on Detroit's burgeoning underground tiki culture and had completely fallen under the sway of the whole wonderfully ridiculous idea of it. Looking at the flyer, he couldn't help thinking of what fueled the popularity of tiki culture in midcentury America: the repression and conformity of the times, i.e., being too normal. It was a way for gray-flannel types to shed their inhibitions, go native, and get weird—uninhibited boozing, semierotic dancing to faux-exotic music, gaudy flowered shirts, sticky finger foods, unclad maiden flesh, and phallic tiki idols. At one point, Detroit had three Polynesian palaces, but when the city started bleeding honkies after the '67 race riot, all of them eventually closed. Only one building was still standing, albeit shuttered: the Chin Tiki, after which this shindig was named.

Joe had gone for the past two years. It was always filled with interesting people: artists, musicians, performers, writers, filmmakers, zinesters, photographers, drag queens, performance artists, aging punk rockers, sundry eccentrics, all people whose normalcy Ana might call into question. Joe often felt a little outclassed because so many of them seemed to be doing so much—performing, making art and music, getting grants and fellowships—while he was still a mere freelancer for the Independent, as well as some websites and a few other (now dwindling) print publications. Jealousy aside, it wasn't unusual that he would end up interviewing people from this crowd, which resulted in substantial pieces that actually made Joe feel like a real writer.

After getting his creative writing degree, he had actually aspired to the life of a freelancer. Journalism had seemed like a great way to support himself, so he could have the time to write short stories, though it never quite worked out that way. After three years of constant rejection by small literary magazines, he finally did get something accepted. The Bellwether Journal liked his story, which wasn't so much a story as a collection of humorous fragments about a suicidal man with a big nose, a kind of cross between Gogol's The Nose and Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up. He was thrilled about the story's acceptance and told everyone at work about it, but it turned out that people who worked at Blockbuster Video weren't all that interested in his literary achievements. Which turned out to be a good thing when the magazine went under before his story was published.

The following year, Terraplane Review accepted his story Detroit Pastoral, and then a month later quietly closed its doors. After he killed one last quarterly, the poor, innocent Kerfuffle, Joe, without really even acknowledging it, just stopped working on his cursed stories. He considered writing a novel, but then thought about all the people who would be left unemployed and homeless if he happened to put down a major publisher. That was what he told himself, at least.

About the only writing successes he'd had were the New in Video capsule reviews for the Independent. (Finally, his credentials from clerking at Blockbuster were paying off!) While he wasn't about to become the next Lester Bangs or Roger Ebert, it was a start and the editor encouraged him be funny or snarky in the reviews. He began hanging around the office when he wasn't doing shifts at the video store, taking any writing job they would give him, no matter how shitty. Eventually, he became the utility guy, the one they could always count on to write something. When they got a new editor, he liked Joe's tastes in what he called kooky, artsy, kitschy stuff and decided that his talents resided in mining the depths of old and weird pop culture. He offered Joe a short column every week where he would recommend obscure or forgotten books, videos, music, and anything else of interest to him. Joe grabbed it, even though it was just slightly more than no money. For the past fifteen years, he'd been doing different versions of the same column, albeit with the occasional name and format change. It wasn't really all that popular, but he did have a following, considering Detroit's taste for the arcane, the old, and the crumbling. And since they weren't paying him very much, they just kept letting him do it. Later, when they needed content for their website, the column was exiled there, which became a good thing as the digital version soon outpaced the actual newspaper.

These days, though, he had gotten lazy, doing the occasional feature, but mostly churning out his column as well as 500- or even 200-word reviews. It was as if everyone else's dwindling attention span was actually making him dumber.

Joe read a little more. He had just started his second beer when his friend Chick walked up to the bar.

Hey, said Joe, closing his book, placing it on the bar facedown. What brings you here?

Just thought I'd stop in for a quick one.

What's up?

Boned. The Man is sticking it to me again.

Joe laughed. This was pretty much the story of Chick's life, according to Chick. The Man was forever sticking it to him.

Our friends out on the coast?

Who else but fucking Hollywood?

Chick was an odd bird, at least for Detroit. He was a screenwriter, and not for small independent films or short art flicks. Chick wrote blockbusters and sci-fi fantasies and animated films. And he wrote them for big Hollywood studios. From what Joe knew of them, he was quite good at it. Actually, Chick was one of those friends that Joe had written about. The Local Boy Strikes It Rich in La-La Land sort of angle. Not that his friend had ever mentioned any figures, but Chick had sold a number of scripts, many for mid-to-high six-figure advances. Joe had read this on various film biz websites (while experiencing a curious emotional admixture of envy, contempt for Hollywood, and pride for his friend). None had ever been produced because Chick wrote the kinds of high-concept projects that were expensive to actually make, so the studio cowards were always spending a lot of money to buy the script so nobody else would get it, and then somehow everything would fall apart, much to Chick's frustration. Basically, he would make a truckload of money, then nothing would happen.

Chick looked at Joe's beer. What are you drinking?

Stroh's.

Chick made a face. Ugh. How can you drink that swill? He motioned to the bartender. I'll have the Two Hearted.

The beer appeared almost immediately before the bartender walked away. She was a tall woman, with blue-black hair and a tattoo on her back, just above the exposed low beltline.

Chick shook his head, as if disgusted. "That girl is fire. She's killing me. Jesus. That tattoo probably says do me in Celtic."

So talk to her.

A woman like that would have nothing to do with me. She's too cool for me. Too tall for me.

Too cool? Because she has a tramp stamp? Might I remind you that you're a rich screenwriter in a town where no one is a rich screenwriter?

That doesn't matter. I'm still this. Chick frowned, splayed his hands, and gestured at his body like it was something he had picked up at the dollar store.

What? You're fine. Look at you, you work out and everything.

Typical short-man syndrome. You can't get taller so you go wider.

Joe laughed. What are you, like, 5'7? Isn't that supposed to be average?"

They say it is, but it isn't. You have no idea what it's like because you're tall. You tall fuckers get all the breaks. You don't even deserve to be tall. You practically slouch. It's wasted on you. Why couldn't I have gotten some of your tallness? But no. Joe Keen, height hog.

Joe shook his head, half laughing.

Chick took a long sip as he watched the bartender. "Oh my god. Would you look at her? She's